It is no surprise that these bodies want to strengthen their fight. These three sports have all faced either allegations of or action against match-fixing in the last three years.
Cricket has had its share of match-fixing inquiries in the last year, surrounding the death of Bob Woolmer. More recently, tennis has been thrust into the match-fixing limelight over allegations that player, Nickolay Davydenko, has fixed some of his games. Paul Dunstone explained. The International Tennis Federation have defended these allegations though, writes Douglas Robson for US Today.
Match-fixing has not been common talk in English football since 1997, when Bruce Grobbelaar, Hans Segers and John Fashanu were acquitted of match-fixing allegations, and in 1999, when four men were jailed for three years each for their parts in an Asian betting syndicate, purposefully causing floodlight failures in the West Ham versus Crystal Palace and Wimbledon versus Arsenal games of that season.
But the majority of the most recent match-fixing scandals in football have been in Italy, where clubs Lazio, Juventus, AC Milan and Fiorentina were all punished in 2006 for match-fixing, and the year before, Genoa and Venezia were punished in a similar scandal leading to Genoa's promotion.What is a surprise to me is that there has been no investigation to my knowledge into Italy's World Cup 2006 win. They had a couple of very narrow victories in their run to the final, most notably beating Australia with a last minute Totti penalty which replays show should never have been given.
Today, UEFA have defended further investigations into match-fixing over the qualifiers for Euro 2008. What is worrying is that a lot of the match-fixing allegations are in Europe, the most prominent being the one in Italy. Worrying because, with the increasing influence of foreign businessmen who care more for money than football in England, how long will it be before there is a Premiership match-fixing scandal?
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